by Stephen King
He was looking down at his lap with dark, musing eyes. Then something else occurred to him and his head jerked up. His thinning hair flew, then settled back.
“Always smiling! Red lipstick and always smiling! Well, I recognize smiles like that. Most men do. ‘Ha-ha, I know you want it, I can smell it on you, but this little rub’s all you’re going to get, so deal with it.’ I could! I could deal with it! But not BD, not him.”
He shook his head slowly.
“There are lots of women like that. It’s easy to get their names. Then you can trace them down on the Internet. There’s a lot of information if you know how to look for it, and accountants know how. I’ve done that … oh, dozens of times. Maybe even a hundred. You could call it a hobby, I guess. You could say I collect information as well as coins. Usually it comes to nothing. But sometimes BD will say, ‘She’s the one you want to follow through on, Bobby. That one right there. We’ll make the plan together, and when the time comes, you just let me take over.’ And that’s what I do.”
He took her hand, and folded her limp and chilly fingers into his.
“You think I’m crazy. I can see it in your eyes. But I’m not, honey. It’s BD who’s crazy … or Beadie, if you like his for-the-public name better. By the way, if you read the stories in the paper, you know I purposely put a lot of misspellings in my notes to the police. I even misspell the addresses. I keep a list of misspellings in my wallet so that I’ll always do it the same way. It’s misdirection. I want them to think Beadie’s dumb—illiterate, anyway—and they do. Because they’re dumb. I’ve only been questioned a single time, years ago, and that was as a witness, about two weeks after BD killed the Moore woman. An old guy with a limp, semi-retired. Told me to give him a call if I remembered anything. I said I would. That was pretty rich.”
He chuckled soundlessly, as he sometimes did when they were watching Modern Family or Two and a Half Men. It was a way of laughing that had, until tonight, always heightened her own amusement.
“You want to know something, Darce? If they caught me dead to rights, I’d admit it—at least I guess I would, I don’t think anybody knows a hundred percent for sure what they’d do in a situation like that—but I couldn’t give them much of a confession. Because I don’t remember much about the actual … well … acts. Beadie does them, and I kind of … I don’t know … go unconscious. Get amnesia. Some damn thing.”
Oh, you liar. You remember everything. It’s in your eyes, it’s even in the way your mouth turns down at the corners.
“And now … everything’s in Darcellen’s hands.” He raised one of her hands to his lips and kissed the back of it, as if to emphasize this point. “You know that old punchline, the one that goes, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you’? That doesn’t apply here. I could never kill you. Everything I do, everything I’ve built … modest as it would look to some people, I guess … I’ve done and built for you. For the kids too, of course, but mostly for you. You walked into my life, and do you know what happened?”
“You stopped,” she said.
He broke into a radiant grin. “For over twenty years!”
Sixteen, she thought but didn’t say.
“For most of those years, when we were raising the kids and struggling to get the coin business off the ground—although that was mostly you—I was racing around New England doing taxes and setting up foundations—”
“You were the one who made it work,” she said, and was a little shocked by what she heard in her voice: calmness and warmth. “You were the one with the expertise.”
He looked almost touched enough to start crying again, and when he spoke his voice was husky. “Thank you, hon. It means the world to hear you say that. You saved me, you know. In more ways than one.”
He cleared his throat.
“For a dozen years, BD never made a peep. I thought he was gone. I honestly did. But then he came back. Like a ghost.” He seemed to consider this, then nodded his head very slowly. “That’s what he is. A ghost, a bad one. He started pointing out women when I was traveling. ‘Look at that one, she wants to make sure you see her nipples, but if you touched them she’d call the police and then laugh with her friends when they took you away. Look at that one, licking her lips with her tongue, she knows you’d like her to put it in your mouth and she knows you know she never will. Look at that one, showing off her panties when she gets out of her car, and if you think that’s an accident, you’re an idiot. She’s just one more snoot who thinks she’ll never get what she deserves.’”
He stopped, his eyes once more dark and downcast. In them was the Bobby who had successfully evaded her for twenty-seven years. The one he was trying to pass off as a ghost.
“When I started to have those urges, I fought them. There are magazines … certain magazines … I bought them before we got married, and I thought if I did that again … or certain sites on the Internet … I thought I could … I don’t know … substitute fantasy for reality, I guess you’d say … but once you’ve tried the real thing, fantasy isn’t worth a damn.”
He was talking, Darcy thought, like a man who had fallen in love with some expensive delicacy. Caviar. Truffles. Belgian chocolates.
“But the point is, I stopped. For all those years, I stopped. And I could stop again, Darcy. This time for good. If there’s a chance for us. If you could forgive me and just turn the page.” He looked at her, earnest and wet-eyed. “Is it possible you could do that?”
She thought of a woman buried in a snowdrift, her naked legs exposed by the careless swipe of a passing plow—some mother’s daughter, once the apple of some father’s eye as she danced clumsily across a grammar-school stage in a pink tutu. She thought of a mother and son discovered in a freezing creek, their hair rippling in the black, iceedged water. She thought of the woman with her head in the corn.
“I’d have to think about it,” she said, very carefully.
He grasped her by the upper arms and leaned toward her. She had to force herself not to flinch, and to meet his eyes. They were his eyes … and they weren’t. Maybe there’s something to that ghost business after all, she thought.
“This isn’t one of those movies where the psycho husband chases his screaming wife all around the house. If you decide to go to the police and turn me in, I won’t lift a finger to stop you. But I know you’ve thought about what it would do to the kids. You wouldn’t be the woman I married if you hadn’t thought about that. What you might not have thought about is what it would do to you. Nobody would believe that you were married to me all these years and never knew … or at least suspected. You’d have to move away and live on what savings there are, because I’ve always been the breadwinner, and a man can’t win bread when he’s in jail. You might not even be able to get at what there is, because of the civil suits. And of course the kids—”
“Stop it, don’t talk about them when you talk about this, don’t you ever.”
He nodded humbly, still holding lightly to her forearms. “I beat BD once—I beat him for twenty years—”
Sixteen, she thought again. Sixteen, and you know it.
“—and I can beat him again. With your help, Darce. With your help I can do anything. Even if he were to come back in another twenty years, so what? Big deal! I’d be seventy-three. Hard to go snoot-hunting when you’re shuffling around in a walker!” He laughed cheerily at this absurd image, then sobered again. “But—now listen to me carefully—if I were ever to backslide, even one single time, I’d kill myself. The kids would never know, they’d never have to be touched by that … that, you know, stigma … because I’d make it look like an accident … but you’d know. And you’d know why. So what do you say? Can we put this behind us?”
She appeared to consider. She was considering, in fact, although such thought processes as she could muster were probably not trending in a direction he would be likely to understand.
What she thought was: It’s what drug addicts say. “I’ll never take any of
that stuff again. I’ve quit before and this time I’ll quit for good. I mean it.” But they don’t mean it, even when they think they do they don’t, and neither does he.
What she thought was: What am I going to do? I can’t fool him, we’ve been married too long.
A cold voice replied to that, one she had never suspected of being inside her, one perhaps related to the BD-voice that whispered to Bob about the snoots it observed in restaurants, laughing on street corners, riding in expensive sports cars with the top down, whispering and smiling to each other on apartment-building balconies.
Or perhaps it was the voice of the Darker Girl.
Why can’t you? it asked. After all … he fooled you.
And then what? She didn’t know. She only knew that now was now, and now had to be dealt with.
“You’d have to promise to stop,” she said, speaking very slowly and reluctantly. “Your most solemn, never-go-back promise.”
His face filled with a relief so total—so somehow boyish—that she was touched. He so seldom looked like the boy he had been. Of course that was also the boy who had once planned to go to school with guns. “I would, Darcy. I do. I do promise. I already told you.”
“And we could never talk about this again.”
“I get that.”
“You’re not to send the Duvall woman’s ID to the police, either.”
She saw the disappointment (also weirdly boyish) that came over his face when she said that, but she meant to stick to it. He had to feel punished, if only a little. That way he’d believe he had convinced her.
Hasn’t he? Oh Darcellen, hasn’t he?
“I need more than promises, Bobby. Actions speak louder than words. Dig a hole in the woods and bury that woman’s ID cards in it.”
“Once I do that, are we—”
She reached out and put her hand to his mouth. She strove to make herself sound stern. “Hush. No more.”
“Okay. Thank you, Darcy. So much.”
“I don’t know what you’re thanking me for.” And then, although the thought of him lying next to her filled her with revulsion and dismay, she forced herself to say the rest.
“Now get undressed and come to bed. We both need to get some sleep.”
- 10 -
He was under almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, but long after he’d commenced his small, polite snores, Darcy lay awake, thinking that if she allowed herself to drift off, she would awake with his hands around her throat. She was in bed with a madman, after all. If he added her, his score would be an even dozen.
But he meant it, she thought. This was right around the time that the sky began to lighten in the east. He said he loves me, and he meant it. And when I said I’d keep his secret—because that’s what it comes down to, keeping his secret—he believed me. Why wouldn’t he? I almost convinced myself.
Wasn’t it possible he could carry through on his promise? Not all drug addicts failed at getting clean, after all. And while she could never keep his secret for herself, wasn’t it possible she could for the kids?
I can’t. I won’t. But what choice?
What goddam choice?
It was while pondering this question that her tired, confused mind finally gave up and slipped away.
She dreamed of going into the dining room and finding a woman bound with chains to the long Ethan Allen table there. The woman was naked except for a black leather hood that covered the top half of her face. I don’t know that woman, that woman is a stranger to me, she thought in her dream, and then from beneath the hood Petra said: “Mama, is that you?”
Darcy tried to scream, but sometimes in nightmares, you can’t.
- 11 -
When she finally struggled awake—headachey, miserable, feeling hungover—the other half of the bed was empty. Bob had turned his clock back around, and she saw it was quarter past ten. It was the latest she’d slept in years, but of course she hadn’t dropped off until first light, and such sleep as she’d gotten was populated with horrors.
She used the toilet, dragged her housecoat off the hook on the back of the bathroom door, then brushed her teeth—her mouth tasted foul. Like the bottom of a birdcage, Bob would say on the rare mornings after he’d taken an extra glass of wine with dinner or a second bottle of beer during a baseball game. She spat, began to put her brush back in the toothglass, then paused, looking at her reflection. This morning she saw a woman who looked old instead of middle-aged: pale skin, deep lines bracketing the mouth, purple bruises under the eyes, the crazed bed-head you only got from tossing and turning. But all this was only of passing interest to her; how she looked was the last thing on her mind. She peered over her reflection’s shoulder and through the open bathroom door into their bedroom. Except it wasn’t theirs; it was the Darker Bedroom. She could see his slippers, only they weren’t his. They were obviously too big to be Bob’s, almost a giant’s slippers. They belonged to the Darker Husband. And the double bed with the wrinkled sheets and unanchored blankets? That was the Darker Bed. She shifted her gaze back to the wild-haired woman with the bloodshot, frightened eyes: the Darker Wife, in all her raddled glory. Her first name was Darcy, but her last name wasn’t Anderson. The Darker Wife was Mrs. Brian Delahanty.
Darcy leaned forward until her nose was touching the glass. She held her breath and cupped her hands to the sides of her face just as she had when she was a girl dressed in grass-stained shorts and falling-down white socks. She looked until she couldn’t hold her breath any longer, then exhaled in a huff that fogged the mirror. She wiped it clean with a towel, and then went downstairs to face her first day as the monster’s wife.
He had left a note for her under the sugarbowl.
Darce—
I will take care of those documents, as you asked. I love you, honey.
Bob
He had drawn a little Valentine heart around his name, a thing he hadn’t done in years. She felt a wave of love for him, as thick and cloying as the scent of dying flowers. She wanted to wail like some woman in an Old Testament story, and stifled the sound with a napkin. The refrigerator kicked on and began its heartless whir. Water dripped in the sink, plinking away the seconds on the porcelain. Her tongue was a sour sponge crammed into her mouth. She felt time—all the time to come, as his wife in this house—close around her like a strait-jacket. Or a coffin. This was the world she had believed in as a child. It had been here all the time. Waiting for her.
The refrigerator whirred, the water dripped in the sink, and the raw seconds passed. This was the Darker Life, where every truth was written backward.
- 12 -
Her husband had coached Little League (also with Vinnie Eschler, that master of Polish jokes and big enveloping manhugs) during the years when Donnie had played shortstop for the Cavendish Hardware team, and Darcy still remembered what Bob said to the boys—many of them weeping—after they’d lost the final game of the District 19 tourney. Back in 1997 that would have been, probably only a month or so before Bob had murdered Stacey Moore and stuffed her into her cornbin. The talk he’d given to that bunch of drooping, sniffling boys had been short, wise, and (she’d thought so then and still did thirteen years later) incredibly kind.
I know how bad you boys feel, but the sun will still come up tomorrow. And when it does, you’ll feel better. When the sun comes up the day after tomorrow, a little better still. This is just a part of your life, and it’s over. It would have been better to win, but either way, it’s over. Life will go on.
As hers did, following her ill-starred trip out to the garage for batteries. When Bob came home from work after her first long day at home (she couldn’t bear the thought of going out herself, afraid her knowledge must be written on her face in capital letters), he said: “Honey, about last night—”
“Nothing happened last night. You came home early, that’s all.”
He ducked his head in that boyish way he had, and when he raised it again, his face was lit with a large and grateful smile. “That�
�s fine, then,” he said. “Case closed?”
“Closed book.”
He opened his arms. “Give us a kiss, beautiful.”
She did, wondering if he had kissed them.
Do a good job, really use that educated tongue of yours, and I won’t cut you, she could imagine him saying. Put your snooty little heart into it.
He held her away from him, his hands on her shoulders. “Still friends?”
“Still friends.”
“Sure?”
“Yes. I didn’t cook anything, and I don’t want to go out. Why don’t you change into some grubbies and go grab us a pizza.”
“All right.”
“And don’t forget to take your Prilosec.”
He beamed at her. “You bet.”
She watched him go bounding up the stairs, thought of saying Don’t do that, Bobby, don’t test your heart like that.
But no.
No.
Let him test it all he wanted.
- 13 -
The sun came up the next day. And the next. A week went by, then two, then a month. They resumed their old ways, the small habits of a long marriage. She brushed her teeth while he was in the shower (usually singing some hit from the eighties in a voice that was on-key but not particularly melodious), although she no longer did it naked, meaning to step into the shower as soon as he’d vacated it; now she showered after he’d left for B, B & A. If he noticed this little change in her modus operandi, he didn’t mention it. She resumed her book club, telling the other ladies and the two retired gentlemen who took part that she had been feeling under the weather and didn’t want to pass on a virus along with her opinion of the new Barbara Kingsolver, and everyone chuckled politely. A week after that, she resumed the knitting circle, Knuts for Knitting. Sometimes she caught herself singing along with the radio when she came back from the post office or the grocery store. She and Bob watched TV at night—always comedies, never the forensic crime shows. He came home early now; there had been no more road trips since the one to Montpelier. He got something called Skype for his computer, saying he could look at coin collections just as easily that way and save on gas. He didn’t say it would also save on temptation, but he didn’t have to. She watched the papers to see if Marjorie Duvall’s ID showed up, knowing if he had lied about that, he would lie about everything. But it didn’t. Once a week they went out to dinner at one of Yarmouth’s two inexpensive restaurants. He ordered steak and she ordered fish. He drank iced tea and she had a Cranberry Breeze. Old habits died hard. Often, she thought, they don’t die until we do.
